Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

1. Hydraulic fracking made the pricing of natural gas at pennies per cubic mile

2. A gas turbine can be up and running in days

3. Green washing - it's "clean" energy for some definition of clean, certainly compared to coal

I'm exaggerating a bit on points 1 and 2, but the fuel costs are cheap and you can setup a gas turbine plant comparatively quickly compared to a coal or a nuclear power plant. Most people don't care about a gas turbine plant in their backyard, but a coal or nuclear power plant? You're facing a multi-year legal battle that's going to cost you millions of dollars. You have to do environmental impact studies that are going to cost you tens of millions of dollars. There's a lot of complications for how to handle the waste (not just nuclear: coal has SOX, NOX, fly ash and pot ash wastes that you must manage) that cost tens of millions of dollars. A gas turbine is quick, cheap, and easy. Guess which form of electrical power generation is proliferating?

The article has a lot of interesting details about the history of the gas turbine and its incorporation in electrical power generation. Gas turbines first became common in the late 1980s and the US built hundreds of gigawatts of gas turbine generating capacity between 1990 and 2005. This was back when shale gas production was less than 5% of its current rate [1] and gas was a more expensive fuel.

Fast construction speed was an advantage even 30 years ago, and so is the lower number of full time employees needed to operate a CCGT plant vs. equivalent capacity from a nuclear or coal plant. But note that the turbine revolution arrived back when the US was still building coal and nuclear plants. They weren't built just for "green washing" reasons or for avoiding legal battles.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/res_epg0_r5302_nus_bcfa.htm

I grew up 15 miles away from a large natural gas power plant, but could rarely see it. Now that it is long since closed I can see its smokestacks almost every day, and now I also can see the mountain range that used to be perpetually hidden that is 30 miles away. To me those smokestacks serve as a monument to the progress that has been made over the past few decades.

why are there smoke coming of the plant if it's closed ? I'm not quite following what you're actually meaning to say here

I suspect rz2k means that when the plant was operating, they couldn’t even see the towers because of the smoke/smog.

Now that it is closed, and there is no smoke - they can see not just the towers, they now see a long way behind them as well.

There's no smoke coming out.

Best guess: you're confused by the word "smokestack". Smokestack is a synonym for chimney. The power station is closed. The chimneys are still there, but there's no smoke coming out of them.

Smokestack is the names for a chimney. He's saying in the past general smoke in the area means he couldn't see the chimneys or beyond, but now the site is decommissioned (and I assume other heavy industries have gone), the air quality is better and he can see from the rhet.

> Green washing - it's "clean" energy for some definition of clean, certainly compared to coal

It's very clean when compared to coal, 50-60% less CO2.

CO2 is an irrelevant measurement, what matters is CO2e (CO2-equivalent, i.e. what's the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted, measured in the amount of CO2 needed to match their warming potential).

Gas emits a relatively low amount of CO2, but a much higher amount of methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas (easily 10x of CO2, 50x as much depending on how exactly you measure it (e.g. methane has a shorter atmospheric lifetime than CO2)). Measuring only CO2 here is pointless.

But, natural gas is also a sub product of most oil wells. If you don't use it, it is going to be vented or flared anyway. So, it is better to use it, than not using it right now.

so from a global warming perspective, as caused by the greenhouse effect, you are in favor of coal electricity generation of natural gas as the path of least harm? Or are you just arguing semantics?

> but a much higher amount of methane

Err... no.

Natural gas is methane, to a good first approximation, but if your plant is emitting methane, it means your plant is not operating efficiently. Natural gas power plants burn methane, producing CO2 and water.

Edit: if you're talking about production leaks, coal mines emit methane, too, and there's not even a token amount of effort to stop it, nor any incentive to do so. With gas production, every cubic meter that leaks is a cubic meter you don't get to sell.

Edit #2:

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-04/documents/fa...

Note that coal mines are currently the 5th largest methane emitters. However, that would certainly go up a lot if natural gas were replaced with coal.

The number 1 methane emitter, by a fair amount, is still "enteric fermentation" (i.e., farts and burps).

Not too that this table does not include all the naturally-produced methane resulting from the normal rotting of vegetation and non-domestic animal manure. I would almost bet that exceeds even the enteric fermentation.

CO2 is technically not a pollutant though. If I was living close to a power plant it would be the last thing I’d be concerned with.

Also 3. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 and an unbelievable amount gets leaked (especially via fracking).

So much so that from some production areas it can be worse from a ghg perspective than coal.

For a few decades. Methane decays in the atmosphere, while CO2 sticks around for however many centuries until it's physically sequestered.

Methane decays into.... Co2 and water vapour. Both have further green house impacts.

And yet, when there's a big leak, flaring it is the way to go.

And if it's an illegal leak, maybe it needs some help to flare.

Yes, I agree - I'd rather they flare methane and not just leak it. But I wanted to ensure that people didn't think methane just harmlessly decays away. Water vapour at high altitudes causes green house warming, as does the co2 - so while it isn't as bad once decayed, it isn't harmless.

Over 20 years it traps 84x times as much heat and 28x over 100 years. I believe most EPA calculations use the 100 year timescale. So if there's 4% leakage (there are some fields that exceed this) its worse than coal on 100 year timescale.

Its arguable what the correct timescale to consider it is. Personally I think 100 years is too long given methane's potential feedback effects. IE, warming causes methane to be released from Arctic tundra melt causing more warming, etc.

And there's also the issue that the higher the concentration of methane in the atmosphere the longer it takes to decay.

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